The illegal distribution of a digital movie is a common and significant threat to the film industry. With the advent of high-speed broadband Internet access, a pirated copy of a digital video can now be easily distributed to a global audience. A possible means of limiting this type of digital theft is digital video watermarking whereby additional information, called a watermark, is embedded in the host video. This watermark can be extracted at the decoder and used to determine whether the video content is watermarked. This paper presents a review of the digital video watermarking techniques in which their applications, challenges, and important properties are discussed, and categorizes them based on the domain in which they embed the watermark. It then provides an overview of a few emerging innovative solutions using watermarks. Protecting a 3D video by watermarking is an emerging area of research. The relevant 3D video watermarking techniques in the literature are classified based on the image-based representations of a 3D video in stereoscopic, depth-image-based rendering, and multi-view video watermarking. We discuss each technique, and then present a survey of the literature. Finally, we provide a summary of this paper and propose some future research directions.

An Overview of Digital Video Watermarking

Comparative study on the evaluation and benchmarking information hiding approaches based multi-measurement analysis using TOPSIS method with different normalisation, separation and context techniques

Watermarking is a solution for copyright protection and forensics tracking, but recapturing and de-synchronization attacks may be used to effectively remove audio watermarks. Although much effort has been made in recent years, the robustness of audio watermarking against recapturing and de-synchronization attacks is still a challenging issue. Specifically, we first construct the frequency-domain coefficients logarithmic mean (FDLM) feature of digital audio. By theoretical analysis, we conclude that the residual of the two groups’ FDLM feature is robust against recapturing attack. We then propose a robust audio watermarking method based on this feature using the patchwork framework. Compared with the method having the best robustness performance against recapturing attack, the BER value of our method is decreased by 7%. Besides that, the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art patchwork-based watermarking methods notably, under recapturing and post-processed with signal processing operations and de-synchronization attacks.

Patchwork-Based Audio Watermarking Robust Against De-Synchronization and Recapturing Attacks

A multilayer watermarking system is a system that is able to embed watermarks to a host media signal repeatedly in an overlaying manner, without incurring troubles in extracting the watermarks in each layer. In this paper, we present a novel patchwork-based audio watermarking algorithm that can embed and extract watermark bits successfully in such a multilayer framework. In the proposed method, a new watermark embedding algorithm is designed to ensure that the embedded watermarks in a certain layer do not affect the detection of watermarks in other layers. Adding multiple layers of watermark bits inevitably reduces the perceptual quality. However, to minimize the perceptual quality degradation in multilayer watermarking, the audio fragments for watermark embedding are selected from a set of specially arranged discrete cosine transform coefficients of the host audio signal. Watermark embedding is achieved by modifying the mean values of selected sample fragments. With the use of an embedding error buffer, the proposed system can withstand a wide range of common attacks. To maintain the balance between the perceptual quality and robustness, watermark embedding strength is adjusted according to the specific layer used. The proposed multilayer scheme ensures the independence of the processing in different layers. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated and verified by extensive simulation results.

Patchwork-Based Multilayer Audio Watermarking

In spread spectrum (SS) based robust audio watermarking, the scaling parameter is an important factor for balancing between robustness and imperceptibility. There have been intense studies of the embedded parameter optimization in light of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), but little attention has been given to the constrained SNR. Moreover, traditional population-based stochastic search algorithms for optimizing the embedded parameter significantly increase the computation pressure of the corresponding audio watermarking schemes. This paper comprehensively investigates the effect of the constrained SNR on the optimization of the scaling parameter, from both model and algorithmic perspectives. Specifically, the empirical relationship between the scaling parameter, robustness, and imperceptibility is first analyzed in detail. Next, an SNR-constrained optimization model is presented. Then, to solve the proposed model and find the current optimal scaling parameter for watermark embedding, a binary search algorithm and a heuristic search (HS) algorithm are, respectively, developed. Finally, we embed the proposed model and heuristics in the SS-based audio watermarking scheme and compare the integrated technique (called SS-SNR-HS) with the existing similar schemes. The experimental results demonstrate that SS-SNR-HS not only is computationally simple, but also achieves better balance between imperceptibility and robustness and, thus, seems promising in copyright protection of online digital audio.

SNR-Constrained Heuristics for Optimizing the Scaling Parameter of Robust Audio Watermarking

https://dr.ntu.edu.sg/bitstream/10220/40556/1/Twenty%20years%20of%20digital%20audio%20watermarking%20-%20A%20comprehensive%20review.pdf

Yun Q. Shi

Papers

Twenty years of digital audio watermarking-a comprehensive review